Extra Academy is a spontaneous alliance of Extra City, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Sint-Lucas Antwerpen.

The guest speaker of 6 May is Robin Vanbesien.

Taking his recent exposition ‘Gravidade’ as starting point, Robin Vanbesien will speak about practice and methodology: how can a show and the art works shaping the show be a medium for staging thoughts? About ‘Gravidade, Lumiar Cité’ (Lisbon, 2015): “Because he’s alone, a seaman keeps on telling himself who he is”, Kathy Acker writes in her short story ‘Lust’ (1988), referring to Jean Genet’s ‘Querelle de Brest’ (1947), a novel about a young seaman and the exchange of a murder for a transboundary sexual act. A seaman is homeless and always on his own, which gives him the opportunity for acting impulsively and in delusion. Inspired by Acker’s and Genet’s seaman Robin Vanbesien develops a metonymic figure of speech for an unnamed desire. This becomes the red wire through painted, partial objects and many poetic images, evoked by words. Characters, genders and bodies appear at sea as possibilities of an undecidable erotic (homo-erotic or just auto-erotic) phantasy. The relationships seems to be detached as consequence of the desire to an empty self. Everything seems to be connected to the power of attraction that passive verbal forms, static movements and staged compositions arouse. The painted and filmed landscape serves as medium for description of the figures. It reflects the notion of a framed gaze, returned from its object in a mirroring dialogue. Despite their plastic-pictural unity, the author and the hero, the figure and the observer, are mingled in separated worlds. ‘Gravidade’ is named after the homonymous movie, located in the middle of the exposition room, as central point of the circular disposition of seven paintings. The paintings divide the landscape in a figure by creating several partial bodies as partial objects, apart from the figure and his imaginary environment (scrotum, penis, hands, tongues, fish etc). The expressive pictorial quality of the staging of the figures in a poetic quasi-dialogue, puts the movie together as a different kind of painting, attracting the remaining images in the space. Thus the movie gives the illusion that a lack of totality repairs each individual image.

Robin Vanbesien is based in Brussels. He studied History at the Ghent University and Visual Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam) and in the Ateliers (Amsterdam). Recent solo expositions are Gravidade, Lumia Cité (Lisbon, 2015); stray fire / ships to sink like this, Rupert (Vilnius, 2014); F. Hodler (with Willem Oorebeek), Pinacoteca (Vienna) 2014); what must one know, ESAD (Valence, 2014); lighting the throat = lighting the throat, Objectif Exhibitions (Antwerp, 2014); duty-bound away from the keyboard of the screen of my face, WIELS Project Room (Brussels, 2014). He resided among others in the Maumaus Residency Programme (Lisbon, 2014/15), Capacete (Rio de Janeiro, 2014), Rupert (Vilnius, 2014) and the Wiels Residency Programme (Brussels, 2013).

Language English